David W. Suter
creation seems to be not so much an anticipation of the rules in Lev 12:2-5
regarding the periods of purification after childbirth to be observed by a
woman before entering the sanctuary, as it is the establishment of those
rules. Citing C. T. R. Hayward, he observes that "this indicates that a sanctu
ary was an integral part of creation itself from the outset and that it 'has a
good deal to do with the continuing stability and order of creation.'"^22 In
addition to a cosmological and cultic ideal, however, Brooke suggests that
the role of Eden as a primordial temple has a political significance in the
early Maccabean period: "The author of Jubilees may... have had a sense of
the political agenda of the Maccabees after the defeat of the Seleucids....
The sanctification of Eden is a divine guarantee of the political division of
the world into three sections with the descendants of Shem, not the Greeks,
clearly the rightful heirs of the land of Israel (Jub. 8:io-2i)."^23 James Scott
also gives a geopolitical twist to the role of the sanctuaries in Jubilees in his
study of the appropriation in Jub 8-9 of the table of nations in Gen 10, al
though he makes Zion rather than Eden the focal point of the four sanctuar
ies and suggests that Jubilees anticipates that one day Zion, the "navel of the
earth" (Jub 8:19), rather than Greece, will rule the earth (see Jub 22:11-14).^24
Unlike the Book of the Watchers in 1 Enoch, which plays upon the antago
nism of Jerusalem and Dan,^25 Jubilees creates a harmonization of sacred
space to present a view of the earth that is at once sacerdotal and political in
character. In contrast to the one-sanctuary rule of the Deuteronomistic tra
dition, which limits sacred space to one geographical location, Jubilees
imagines the earth as suffused with sanctity.^26
One final twist in the sacerdotal perspective of Jubilees is the role of
the practice of ritual purity in the book. Given the significance of ritual pu
rity in the sectarian literature of the period, its relative absence from Jubilees
is remarkable. Liora Ravid has argued that the absence of a concern for ritual
purity in the book is indicative of a polemic in the work against the Zadokite
- Brooke, "The Ten Temples," 419. See C. T. R. Hayward, The Jewish Temple: A Non-
Biblical Sourcebook (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 86. - Brooke, "The Ten Temples," 420.
- J. M. Scott, Geography in Early Judaism and Christianity: The Book of Jubilees, ed.
R. Bauckham, SNTSMS (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 32-35. - See D. W. Suter, "Why Galilee? Galilean Regionalism in the Interpretation of
1 Enoch 6-16," Hen 25 (2003): 167-212 (here 178-79 and 201-5). - Here contrast the conclusion reached by Larson in "Worship in Jubilees and
Enoch," that "the author manages to indicate that the true intent of God is to limit the places
that are acceptable to God for ritual worship."